Up close with Paul Hansen

Award-winning photojournalist gets his photos by getting to know his subjects

Swedish photographer Paul Hansen poses with a World Press Award-winning picture of the Gaza conflict. The picture of men carrying the bodies of two dead children through a street in Gaza City was taken on November 20, 2012. It's one of two Hansen images in "Pictures of the Year International" at the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park. Angelika Warmuth • AP

Swedish photographer Paul Hansen poses with a World Press Award-winning picture of the Gaza conflict. The picture of men carrying the bodies of two dead children through a street in Gaza City was taken on November 20, 2012. It's one of two Hansen images in "Pictures of the Year International" at the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park. Angelika Warmuth • AP

“Pictures of the Year International”

Paul Hansen, the much respected Swedish photojournalist, was visiting The Washington Post when one of the newspaper’s staff photographers stopped him in his tracks.

“I was telling her how I worked and she said, ‘Paul, it sounds like you get too close to your subjects. You can’t get too close to your subjects.’ ”

Hansen retorted that she had it backward: You have to get close to your subject. In fact, you can’t get too close to your subject.

“I mean, if you aren’t there as a person, why are you there?” Hansen said during a recent visit to San Diego to accept the top photojournalism award in the 2013 Pictures of the Year International competition.

“This,” he said, touching his camera, “is the last thing you do.

“The first thing is talk to people. If they see you as a person and they see that you’re interested, you’re in.”

A selection of the top images from Pictures of the Year International is now on exhibit at the Museum of Photographic Arts, including two of Hansen’s winning photos, one with a group of men carrying the bodies of two children and behind them, the body of the children’s father.

That photo, with its unavoidable, heartbreaking, humanity, is especially characteristic of Hansen’s work. He’s often described as empathetic (although one of his editors went further and called him a “bleeping social worker”).

“I come from a really poor background,” said Hansen, a staff photographer for Sweden’s Dagens Nyheter. “I tend to do stories on people who were society’s victims. Like homeless people, drug addicts, welfare mothers — all the people that if it hadn’t been for a few lucky breaks in my life, I could have been one of them.”

Hansen’s break was courtesy of an uncle who gave him a camera when he was barely out of grade school. Hansen was not only entranced by its ability to create images, but the access and connections it afforded.

“I was very shy when I grew up; I still am,” said Hansen, whose large family lived in Sweden but frequently visited Denmark (where his father also had children). “I felt very isolated. ... So the camera became a way to break that isolation; it became a tool. And then it became a profession because I also like the magic of framing pictures.”

He’ll now spend years working on a developing story (balanced by shorter-term assignments all over the globe), and although The Washington Post might be horrified, he doesn’t worry about getting close.

“Most of the people I do long-term stories on in Sweden?” said Hansen. “They are my friends for life.”